{"id":338,"date":"2013-04-11T18:01:15","date_gmt":"2013-04-11T23:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/?p=338"},"modified":"2013-04-11T18:01:15","modified_gmt":"2013-04-11T23:01:15","slug":"book-review-flora","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/book-review-flora\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Flora"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Flora<\/a>FLORA by Gail Godwin
\nBloomsbury, May 2013<\/p>\n

If this book were a fable, it would be “How Helen Learns to Feel Remorse.”\u00a0 There are stories from the past told by Nonnie and Flora and Finn, but mostly there is the story told by Helen herself about the summer of 1945 when she was isolated at home in NC with her dead mother’s cousin Flora as guardian while her father went to work over the mountain in Oak Ridge, TN.\u00a0 Flora is an innocent from Alabama, a 22-year-old graduate of teacher’s college preparing for her first classroom, glad to have a summer job looking after her cousin’s 10 year old daughter, and eager to do everything just right.\u00a0 But there is no pleasing Helen that summer.\u00a0 Her beloved paternal grandmother, Nonnie, has just died, her father has gone away to work on a secret government project, and the polio scare has quarantined her at home with Flora.\u00a0 Home is “Old One Thousand”, a big crumbling house that her grandparents and their son shared with the Recoverers, former patients of local sanatoriums for TB, alcoholic, and mental patients.\u00a0 These are long gone, but Helen knows them all from Nonnie’s stories.\u00a0 She first meets Flora at Nonnie’s funeral, where she is embarrassed by the easy and constant tears of her mother’s cousin.\u00a0 A 70-year-old Helen narrates the story in the voice of her 10-year-old self, a grumpy self-important child with a great imagination.\u00a0 Helen feels superior to Flora, and indeed to everyone else.\u00a0 But she is sorely tested by this summer, and it does not end well.\u00a0 One outsider who visits their mountain top home is Finn, an Irish-American veteran who delivers the groceries on his motorcycle and stays for dinner and draws their portraits.\u00a0 Both Helen and Flora fall in love with him.\u00a0 He tries to teach Helen to be adventurous, and Flora to drive Nonnie’s car.\u00a0 Seeing Flora through Helen’s eyes, it takes a long time to discover the value of her kindness, simplicity and “single-heartedness”.\u00a0 Flora tries to tell Helen stories about her mother’s people in AL, but Helen does not want to listen or understand; she never knew her mother, and she is determined to demean Flora.\u00a0 Poor Helen.\u00a0 She’s a child and she just does not see with an adult’s comprehension how she is both instigator and victim of tragic events that close the novel.\u00a0 There are other characters whose portraits are skillfully drawn in this book, such as Beryl Jones, Harry Anstruther and Old Mongrel Earl Quarles, but Nonnie, Helen and Flora are the focus.\u00a0 Helen gets to keep the letters Nonnie wrote to encourage Flora to have the self-confidence she needed (“Others judge you at your own estimation”) and she absorbs material for her career as a writer.\u00a0 Helen is smart, so she knows that remorse is necessary, and it follows her throughout her life.\u00a0 Readers will enjoy meeting these people and seeing life in a time that now seems incredibly remote, and they too will learn something valuable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FLORA by Gail Godwin Bloomsbury, May 2013 If this book were a fable, it would be “How Helen Learns to Feel Remorse.”\u00a0 There are stories from the past told by Nonnie and Flora and Finn, but mostly there is the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":358,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions\/358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}